Stuck at at the Airport

Sitting at the airport lounge, and typing fastidiously over endless cups of coffee has now become a norm. With all the travel, airports sure have become a second home, and airport lounges, an extra room to my own 1 bhk in Mumbai.

No kidding, but I actually used to love the feeling of being at an airport. I have always liked it. Guess it stemmed from my love for traveling. The airport gave me the peace of mind and the relaxation hours that was otherwise tough to find. Airports (and of course airplanes) were the perfect venues to catch up with reading. Airports were always fun.

The above still holds true and I still completely enjoy the experience of flying, unless of course it is on a Saturday night!

The agony amplifies with the fact that there is a party on in the metropolis and I am getting late, really late to get there before it is all out and dry! I was anyways getting late to the party, and now with the delay I hopefully would not be disturbing puking slumber!

To add to the fire is the fact that I was not available in the metropolis last weekend too due to work commitments. This weekend too, one day is spent working and the Saturday night is spent typing away at the airport.

The final straw to the fury – the flight gets delayed by a full one and a half hours and counting. So the initially scheduled time of departure of 9:55PM now stands at 11:30 PM, and the crew thinks she is being sweet by saying, “this is the time of departure is as of now”.

So now I have an additional 95 minutes to kill to the previous 115 minutes( i had come to the airport at 8PM itself for a 9:55PM flight!) and 210 minutes are long even by Hindi movie length standards. At this time I was had made up my mind of leasing a private jet about which I read on this website, but as the ticket was in my hand and I had given my bags as check-in, I could not do much.

Technical snag they say, Jet Airways, why don’t you just discard the plane, or maybe have a standby plane for such exigencies. Maybe you can charge a 100 buck more on each of your tickets to pay for the standby aircrafts. 100 more bucks to the already expensive flight ticket would not pinch greatly.

Oh! Jet Airways is busy sleeping around with Etihad and such “small” difficulties to a “domestic” passenger would not really matter to Mr. Goyal anymore.

So what exactly can one do in such situations, other than staring at fellow passengers that is. I can maybe :

• Browse through the bookstore and make mental and maybe digital note of all the books you want to read. (You can of course later check up the prices online and then consider buying them!)
• While you are at the bookstore, you can actually read up all the interesting articles from The Economist. This is if standing and reading is your thing.

Well, you cannot do the above two if you are the Ahmedabad Airport, as the book store owner rates his sleep at a higher priority than catering to stranded passengers like you. The bookstore is shut!

• You can sit at the free access lounge and keep ordering food.

This option again cannot be exercised at the Ahmedabad airport, as some smart architect thought having the lounge before the check in area made more sense than having it after the security check in.

• Convince those noisy over fed rich Gujju kids for a flash mob. Not really recommended again at the Ahmedabad airport.
•  Keep munching all that you can eat at the airport. Well, would not take long if you are the Ahmedabad airport departures. How much could one possible take to taste from Subway, HavMor icecreams and 2 tea shops?
• Do something that you have wanting to be doing for long, but have not been getting the time for – BLOG!!!

You know which option i chose!